“Tide of Shadows” is a military science fiction tale about a group of genocide survivors aboard the spaceship Spirit of a Sudden Wind. Travelling half the length of a galaxy, they’re on a mission of vengeance: to seek retribution against the terrifying alien race that destroyed their home world, and bring peace to the spirits of fallen.

The Crimson Campaign starts up where Promise of Blood left off and takes us deeper into the world of flintlock rifles, black powder sorcery, vengeful gods, political intrigue and international war. Inspector Adamat tracks a psychopath holding his family hostage, Field Marshal Tamas is cut off behind enemy lines with no hope of rescue, and Taniel Two-shot finds himself friendless in an army he once thought he knew.

To fill the time between the first and second novels, I wrote a number of pieces of short fiction set in the Powder Mage universe and featuring side characters from the novels. It started as a kind of a lark (hey, I have this story idea, I think I’ll write it and see if anyone likes it), and the response ended up blowing me away. People seemed to really love the idea of crawling deeper into the world. The first of these stories “The Girl of Hrusch Avenue” is available as a free download for the next eleven days courtesy of A Dribble of Ink. It features a young Vlora surviving on the streets of Adopest. I hope you enjoy it. Read More »

Tor.com is celebrating its fifth birthday. As part of this celebration, my old haunt has compiled an eBook anthology of all the short stories published on Tor.com during that period. It’s called The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com and it contains 151 stories from many of today’s best writers of science fiction and fantasy, including Nnedi Okorafor, Rachel Swirsky, Daniel Abraham, and Jay Lake.

Tor.com describes the celebration:

Tor.com is celebrating its fifth birthday this week and as one of the many things we’re doing to mark the occasion, we’ve assembled the entire last five years of our award-winning original fiction into one handy, and possibly physics-defying, ebook.

This ebook is free to Tor.com’s registered users to download, as a thank you for joining and contributing to our community over the years. Enjoy!

We all know the labyrinthine story of Scott Lynch’s The Republic of Thieves. But who cares about that now. Lynch is done the book and it’s been guaranteed (by Lynch, his publishers and many others), that the book is coming this Autumn, come hell or high water. Lynch recently revealed some details about The Republic of Thieves, which might, hopefully, satisfy fans as they wait for the Autumn release:

When does The Republic of Thieves pick up chronologically?

The “present day” thread resumes the story a few weeks after the end of Red Seas Under Red Skies. The flashback thread shows several episodes from Locke’s early years, and then a long adventure from when Locke, Jean, and Sabetha were about sixteen.

So Sabetha is actually in this thing?

Yes, Sabetha Belacoros is finally revealed in person for the first time and is a major character in The Republic of Thieves.

Do we find out more about the Bondsmagi?

The Bondsmagi are fairly integral to the plot. We meet several more of them and explore their home city of Karthain.

Maybe more satisfying is the chapter just released by io9. It makes me feel all tingly just reading new fiction from Lynch. I’ve missed the bugger.

Time passed, days and months chaining together into years, and Jean Tannen joined the Gentlemen Bastards. In the summer of the seventy-seventh Year of Perelandro, two years after Jean’s arrival, a rare dry spell came over the city-state of Camorr, and the Angevine ran ten feet below its usual height. The canals went gray and turgid, thickening like blood in the veins of a ripening corpse.

Canal trees, those glorious affectations that usually roamed and twirled on the city’s currents with their long float-threaded roots drinking the filth around them, now bobbed in sullen masses, confined to the river and the Floating Market. Their silk-bright leaves dulled and their branches drooped; their roots hung slack in the water like the tentacles of dead sea-monsters. Day after day the Temple District was shrouded in layers of smoke, as every denomination burned anything that came to mind in sacrifices pleading for a hard, cleansing rain that wouldn’t come.

In the Cauldron and the Dregs, where the lowest of the low slept ten to a room in windowless houses, the usual steady flow of murders became a torrent. The duke’s corpse-hunters, paid as they were by the head, whistled while they fished putrefying former citizens out of barrels and cess-pits. The city’s professional criminals, more conscientious than its impulsive killers, did their part for Camorr’s air by throwing the remains of their victims into the harbor by night, where the predators of the Iron Sea quietly made the offerings vanish.

You like free things, right? And you like good, critically-lauded novels? Of course you do.

Thanks to Night Shade Books, you can pick up eBook versions of the first two novels by Kameron Hurley (remember her? She wrote this awesome blog post), God’s War and Infidel. How do you get ’em? It’s easy, just send an email to the following address:

It’s that easy. And, you know, you’re just not going to find a better deal than that this week. So, hop on it. Conveniently, this promotion comes just in time for the release of Rapture, the third and final volume in the Bel Dame Apocrypha

If you’re curious about why you should be excited by Hurley’s series, check out Justin Landon’s recent review of God’s War, and keep an eye on A Dribble of Ink for upcoming reviews of both Infidel and Rapture.